The glorious return of the England cricket team

Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance.

I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes, Joe Root and the rest – play the game I love like deities. If Putin is going to press the big red button then so be it. As the temperature rises to a million degrees celsius here in Putney, I will console myself that at least I witnessed Jonny Bairstow’s transcendentally perfect innings at Trent Bridge earlier this month.

We deserve this, don’t we? We England cricket fans who over many decades have suffered so much.

Yes, there have been high points in recent years – I consider the Stokes-inspired 2019 Miracle of Headingley to be amongst the happiest moments of my life, and the Ashes glory in 2005 was likewise something I intend, Putin notwithstanding, to tell the grandchildren about – but we’ve never had anything like this.

We’ve never had a team so unabashedly committed to a style of play that seems almost post-coital in its exuberance – our batsmen playing throughout the recent series against New Zealand with the unfettered joy of young men recently relieved of their virginity. Something massive has very clearly changed for them, and with it the realisation that things never again have to be as they were.

After only one win in England’s last 17 test matches prior to June, evidently a new paradigm of possibility has opened – one in which all that is required to thrive seems to be willingness always to take the gung-ho option – to 'run toward the danger', as new coach Brendon McCullum is said to have put it.

In his last three innings for the national team, Bairstow has scored 369 runs off 293 balls, for wonderfully sustained periods seeming content to score only in sixes and fours. Likewise, the team have chased down previously terrifying fourth innings totals – the kind of scores that over generations have seen England teams capitulate hopelessly – as if they were nothing to worry about.

Can the secret to sport, and life, really just be to throw caution to the wind? Probably not. But suddenly I find myself wondering why the tennis players at Wimbledon hit second serves that are slower than their first. Why don’t they just trust their talent and let the devil take the hindmost? Surely it’s the way of the future.

Naturally it is Stokes first and then McCullum who are being feted for the miraculous turnaround of the test team, but for my money the lion’s share of the praise should be directed at Rob Key.

Appointed managing director of English cricket only as recently as April, the decisions he has made, particularly in recruiting McCullum, who had never previously coached a national team, have been every bit as thrilling as those his players are now making. Key has played nothing safe, and the results have been instantaneous.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be as surprising as it seems. His approach to life, and cricket, is spelled out unapologetically in his excellent autobiography Oi, Key: Tales of a Journeyman Cricketer, in which again and again he returns to the theme of his loathing for modern coaching methods that prioritise group bonding over the unleashing of individual talent, and his belief that sportsmen give themselves the best chance to thrive when they remember what they are doing is essentially pointless.

He writes: 

“Jos Buttler has the right idea. On the end of his bat handle he’s written “f*** it”. Every player should do that. Before they do anything, bat, bowl, whatever, they should go back and think, “what is the worst that could happen?” Life will go on. Some people, nurses, doctors, soldiers, don’t have that luxury. In sport, we are fortunate to be able to switch that perspective. It’s a game of cricket. Remember that.

Of course it won’t last. How can it? Running toward danger at every opportunity can at best be described as a short-term strategy. Cricket is a tactical game – perhaps the most tactical after chess – and a one-dimensional approach of attack at all costs, as if consequences are imaginary, will soon enough be exposed by a better team than New Zealand. Perhaps that is what is happening as you read this, and India have us 73-9 in the first innings, and looking somewhat foolish.

If England repeatedly throw away potential series wins by disregarding lores of the game familiar to everyone who has ever picked up a bat, that demand batsmen play themselves in carefully and protect their wicket as they would their life, then the public will quickly grow annoyed and pressure to come up with a more traditional approach will become irresistible.

But please, not yet. Against a backdrop of relentlessly, and apocalyptically, bad headlines relating seemingly to every aspect of human endeavour, let us have for a few months at least more of this glorious, swashbuckling and romantic England cricket team. Thank you, Rob Key.